New OSM Contributor Feed

by Pascal Neis - Published: July 1st, 2012

The OpenStreetMap project keeps attracting more and more new members that register and start contributing their data to the project. In one of my last blog posts I presented a website which shows the location of each new and active member based on one of their first edits. Since the launch of this website, some of you asked me about a potential opportunity to feed this information for a particular area. Well, there you go!

The “deg” parameter is used to specify the length (degrees) of your bbox. This means that with a “deg” value of 1, a distance of about 111km in each direction from your center point will be determined to create the bbox. This value of 1 degree also represents the maximum distance possible. The resulting Atom feed contains all new members of the past 7 days that made at least one change in you predefined area [1]. Some additional information about each new member was added too [2]. The database will be updated every morning between 6 and 7am CET.

21 Responses to “New OSM Contributor Feed”

Again a really nice tool from Neis-one. This is really helpful for spotting new users, welcome them, and check if they maybe deleted a lot of stuff in their first edit not being aware that this was already live 😉

Very handy indeed !
I use it to get in touch with the new contributors in my areas of interest, to discuss about first modifications and propose some help, if required.

Maybe it could be further improved to be informed:
_ only when a new contributor reaches x changesets (e.g. 5)
_ after n weeks for contributors with less than x changesets

For the first case, it allows to have a quick overview of the contributor’s interests and way of contribution, but also gives some time to get along with the various contribution tools.
It is later on easier to contact the contributor with a personnal message, and allows to focus on the most motivated ones, where the chance for establishing a dialog is higher.

For the second case, purpose would be to send a short reminder, ask for some feedback on the OSM project, and ultimately to correct data that will probably not be adjusted shortly if the contributor is not active anymore

Hi Fabien, thank you very much for your comment and your feedback. Overall I think it is not easy to integrate your second idea into that tool because I haven’t this information about how many changesets a new user have. IMHO I will just be informed if a new user starts next to me and it doesn’t matter if the new user has one or ten changesets. Do you know what I mean?

I made it with a country feed, as this is still manageable in a small country like Belgium. As we have different languages, it would be nice if you could pick an administrative area of the highest level to build the feed. But I can imagine that being slightly complicated to build. (and I can just check manually what language they probably speak)